The Real Detroit Weekly is one of those free advertisers you can pick up on most downtown street corners in big cities. Some people read them for their announcements of local cultural events, others read them for their erotic personal ads, and still others use them to stay warm while living on the street. As sources of news and educated opinion, though, they’re of even less use than the politically correct mainstream media.

Last week’s issue of the Real Detroit Weekly included a piece by Jay Davis attacking Mark Mathis, one of the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Titled “Unevolved,” Davis’ piece calls Mathis “not qualified” to evaluate scientific aspects of evolutionary theory. In particular, he blasts Mathis for being unaware that “scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.” Davis is indignant that Mathis has “just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail.”

I am reliably informed that the “peer-reviewed research” Davis sent to Mathis was a link to a 1995 web page that defends Darwinism by allegedly listing “Observed Instances of Speciation.” The web page actually does include some observed cases of speciation in plants due to an increase in the number of chromosomes, or “polyploidy.” But Darwin’s theory requires the splitting of one species into two, which then diverge and split and diverge and split, over and over again. Only this — and not polyploidy — could produce the branching-tree pattern required by Darwinian evolution, in which all species are descendants of a common ancestor that have been modified by natural selection.

Unfortunately for Darwinists, there has never been a published, confirmed report of Darwinian speciation. The starting point for everything else in Darwin’s theory thus lacks any direct evidence. Some evolutionary biologists have pointed this out in the scientific literature. For details and references, see Chapter Five (“The Ultimate Missing Link”) of my Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

Darwin called The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection “one long argument.” Yet he had no direct evidence for the hypothesis represented by the title of his book. Neither do his modern followers. Where Darwin gave us one long argument, modern Darwinists — including Jay Davis — give us one long bluff.